April 2021. Honolulu.
It is early evening now. In a few minutes, the sun will set over Ala Moana beach, a short distance west of where I am. My apartment, on the 11th floor, overlooks the Ala Wai canal at the corner of McCully — always traffic, always sound. My balcony’s sliding doors and jalousie windows are open, a salty breeze filters in as the low sun casts a golden glow over the south face of the Ko’olau Mountains in the distance and the city of Honolulu in the fore.
But for me, in this moment...I am hunched over my laptop, intently focused on the open brokerage page in front of me. I press “Confirm,” instantly selling all of the stock in my personal investment account. When the money clears into my bank account, I convert it all into bitcoin and then move it into cold storage.
Today, I have become a bitcoiner.
Origins
This was my personal “Bitcoin Moment.” The moment when I realized that, even with the most conservative outlook, there is basically no other “investment” that I could make that will deliver anything close to the returns I expect from bitcoin over the next 20–30+ years. Embracing this understanding, this was my moment of stepping over the threshold, remorselessly going "all-in." Selling off assets (stock) that almost everyone — from my most educated and accomplished friends, to my mother, to the random Spring Breaker from Jacksonville stumbling down the Waikiki strip — would (and at different points, did) tell me to hold, in order to increase exposure to bitcoin - which they felt was unacceptably risky, if not an outright scam.
Today, my views have evolved even further from that moment. I no longer think of bitcoin as an investment, because bitcoin is not an investment. Bitcoin is money. Full stop. And therefore, the act of holding bitcoin is saving. I no longer think in terms of USD returns on bitcoin, as this implies an intention to sell. Instead, I now think in terms of value capture, purchasing power per satoshi (the smallest unit of a bitcoin — as there are 100 pennies to a dollar, there are 100M satoshis to 1 bitcoin). In my present view, that dollars, or euros, or yuan — all of which are functionally infinite — can be traded for bitcoin, which is absolutely finite, is simply a lucky quirk of happenstance. The great fortunate of randomly coming into an understanding of bitcoin at time when the market misunderstanding of this new money is still so gross that anyone would willingly part with bitcoin in exchange for government currency.
But let me not get ahead of myself. My present bullishness on bitcoin is not what's important here — my feelings about bitcoin will be examined in stride throughout the writings to come. Rather, what I am interested in here is the journey, “how the heck did I arrive at my 'Bitcoin Moment' in the first place?”
This is the question that has captured my mind and now inspires me to write, to examine my own long and meandering path to "becoming a bitcoiner." For instance, I mark my bitcoiner awakening as April 2021 — but then again, maybe that’s not entirely right — did I actually become a bitcoiner in that moment, or had I already been one in many core ways (perhaps even in ways that I did not realize) and I just came to the discovery of this pre-existing personal truth? Was it an act of becoming OR, rather an act of committing to being a bitcoiner? And then what does it even mean, to be a bitcoiner? Is this even an appropriate question to ask?
I no longer think of bitcoin as an investment, I think of it as savings
Attempting to answer, or at a minimum, engage with, these questions has kicked off an experiment of deep introspection, an exercise of peeling back the onion, and untangling the thread of my own life up to this point. It has required self-reflection on foundational lessons from childhood, deconstruction of habits of mind from my education and upbringing, examinations of professional experiences and group associations, questions of identity, specifically being an African American in a global world, insights from far-flung travel both abroad and here at home (the US), and rumination on so many near misses — when I could have “gotten” bitcoin much earlier had it existed then or had my views on things been juuust so slightly different.
Clubhouse Bitcoining
While not the starting point of my engagement with bitcoin, I can say unequivocally that catching ‘The Clubhouse Moment” from Jan 2021 onward, was a particularly formative experience.
For future reader's Clubhouse is/was a VoIP group chat mobile app. A literal chat room, seemingly bringing the entire internet full circle from text-only chat rooms of the dial-up AOL days. Clubhouse launched in the deepest point of the US COVID pandemic/hysteria an scaled an break-neck speed, filling the wailing void of lost human interaction in everyone's totally collapsed and locked-down social lives.
Through Clubhouse, I was able to first observe, then engage with, and finally join one of the most varied, talented, resourceful, deeply interesting, and utterly strange groups of people I’ve ever had the great fortune to associate with — bitcoiners. Intelligent to the point of wild arrogance, studied to the point of oddness, traveled to the point of weird suspicion, insightful to the point of deep disquiet, convicted to the point of cultish religiosity, accomplished to the point of well-warranted disbelief, honest to the point of seeming bizarre, edge to the point of being fringe.
I do not mean any of the above as harsh criticism or insult, in fact quite the opposite. On the 9-box Alignment System chart, bitcoiners are the Chaotic Column...and usually the “Chaotic Good”. If there were a Bitcoiner’s Mantra, it would be something like “Do no harm…unless they deserve it.” With bitcoiners you find a paradoxical union of unique, even freakish individual strangeness, with equally strange (as compared to “normal society” or "normieland" as we say), yet broadly shared positive ethical standards that makes distributed, and even anonymous, trust possible between counterparties — both economically and, increasingly, socially. In all, I’d assess that everyone I’ve encountered who really “gets” bitcoin is 3–5 standard deviations out from the norm on some characteristic or another…again, usually, in a good way.
Oh, What a Time to Be Alive
To me, this is a pattern that is simply too fascinating to ignore. To have any real understanding of bitcoin today, even as bitcoin is already more than 14 years old, is incredibly strange in its own right. That so many who have acquired this still extremely niche understanding should also be so abnormal as to be outstanding suggests to me that the two may be connected in some way. I truly believe that future society will look back and deem that to have gained clear-headed understanding of bitcoin pre-mass adoption (or “hyperbitcoinization”), is to be deserving of study. I certainly believe this — right now, today. That said, having neither the means nor the general inclination to travel into the Escheresque mouth of madness that would be required of a broad psychographic study of present day bitcoiners, what I can contribute, however, is an open examination of my own story. My Journey into Bitcoin.
Every bitcoiner, like Batman or The Joker, has an “origin story.” It is such a common trope in the community that many bitcoin conferences will have a panel dedicated entirely to 4 or 5 people sharing their origin stories while simultaneously riffing new insights off of each other in real time. If you are a bitcoiner already, consider yourself very, very lucky. It doesn’t matter if you became a bitcoiner in 2010, 2017, 2021, or 10 minutes ago. We are incredibly early, and it takes an almost magical, borderline metaphysical series of events in life to have come to a grounded understanding of bitcoin where we are today. If you understand bitcoin today, you’ve been through a giant plinko game where everything had to go exactly right, to place you out on the extreme tail. This is why it is not totally unreasonable and not entirely unhinged when many bitcoiners say “bitcoin found me, not the other way around.” I, for one, absolutely feel this way.
That so many who have acquired this still extremely niche understanding should also be so abnormal as to be outstanding suggests to me that the two may be connected in some way
Bitcoiners constantly say that the most important thing one must do over the next 10–20 years is simply “hodling” (i.e. acquiring bitcoin, holding in secure self custody, and not selling). However, I believe its must more than that. If we intend to hold our bitcoin successfully over the long-term, it becomes critically important to understand how and why we each, individually, got here to be in this conversation now. Self-discovery, self-awareness, self-confidence, and the resulting self-actualization are essential input to self-sovereignty. And individual self-sovereignty is the foundation for the sovereign families and sovereign communities that we must set about creating if we want bitcoin, and far more pressingly, the very concept to individual rights and freedoms to mean anything against the very real threat of an ever-more atomized and digitally-enclosed future.
How can we build if we don’t understand, and when necessary, repair and strengthen, our own foundations?
So now, inspired but the likes of Cryptograffti and Brekkie von Bitcoin, artists who share the process of their art with BT (Bitcoin Twitter), I hope to make my exercise of writing an open experience. I look forward to comments and feedback from other bitcoiners or anyone interested enough to read and engage, bitcoiner or not. Most of all, I hope the examination of my story may inspire others to share their stories and to engage with their own self-discovery more deeply through the lens of how bitcoin, and the bitcoin community, has impacted their lives.
Thank you for making it this far, I am truly humbled. This is only the beginning. More to come soon!
Postscript
In the spirit of inter/multi-disciplinary bitconery, here a few top notch recommendations that are on my mind. Would love to hear some of yours!
Music: Plantasy, Resavior; Esc(Holding Back), Model Man; Darling, Esbe
Books: The 7th Property, Eric Yakes; The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu; The Alchemist, Coelho
If you’re ever in Honolulu: Ho’omaluhia Botanical Garden, Valley of the Temples, Tane Vegan Izakaya, The Blind Ox, Lanikai Beach